Hallelujah: A Zen Story with Leonard Cohen

By Thomas McConkie, adapted from an episode of Mindfulness+

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The word hallelujah is a Hebrew word that essentially means praise to the Lord. It’s an invitation to rejoice, to recognize the brilliance and beauty of divinity. 

Why am I starting this post by defining the word hallelujah? Zoom back to Fall 2011. I had been in China for years, and I decided after my sister's wedding that I was going to stick around stateside and clear some skeletons out of the closet. But before I took my traumatic childhood head on, I stopped off at a monastery for a little while. 

I was at Bodhi Manda Zen Center in the Jemez Mountains of New Mexico, and I entered into an intense training period known as kessei. I'm just doing the schedule of sitting long hours every day chanting, marching, and doing work practice — chores to keep the tempo up and keep the grounds clean. 

On different days there'd be different tasks, and one day I found myself in a patch of weeds. Literally I was weeding on my hands and knees. It was tiring, dirty work. My mind would wander, and I'd call it back to the weeds. Then my mind would wander, and I'd call it back to the weeds. And I was doing that whole Zen practice where I was practicing just weeding, and all of a sudden I heard a haunting baritone voice just up the way.

It turned out at that particular retreat Leonard Cohen had come out of hiding. He'd gone away for years. But all of a sudden he was back on the scene, not only offering concerts again, but showing up for training with his teacher, Sasaki Roshi, who was my teacher. And there I was at the Zen center pulling weeds, making my way through another mundane moment in life. And all of a sudden I was totally exalted.

Everything was the same and nothing was the same one. Leonard started singing, and everything changed. It wasn't just me tripping over my clumsy robes and enduring the New Mexico heat. I was enjoying a private concert with Leonard Cohen, and I became aware of the quality of cool silvery autumn sunshine in New Mexico. And I felt the lusciousness of having a human body and having a human life. It's like the singing punched a hole in the sky and I could feel Leonard's heart and I was connected to it and I was connected to everything. And all of a sudden I felt this overwhelming outpouring of gratitude that I could just be alive in this moment. I couldn't believe I was experiencing what I was experiencing.

As I call up the story now, it strikes me what a classical Buddhist experience it was. Now granted, I haven't since had that experience of a rock star serenading me at a Zen center. That was just kind of lucky. But the metaphor holds that our life is full of ordinary moments. This one right now, and this one right now, and this one right now — endless moments in flux, sweeping through the space of awareness. And when we're collapsed, when we're lost in everyday mind, wandering and mind saying, “Oh, been here, done that. I'm just weeding, trying to stay cool. Everything seems quiet, boring and unremarkable.” And yet our awareness has this capacity to relax and open up and wake up. And when our awareness opens up and wakes up, all of a sudden more light filters through and more intelligence animates our being. And we get glimpses of how incredibly remarkable creation is itself and of the way creation goes on creating this moment and this moment and this moment. 

One of the fundamental tenets of Buddhist practice is that life is not about how pleasurable the experiences we can have are. It's not about trying to chase after a more pleasurable experience, but really looking at how we're relating to every experience. What is our relationship to this moment? In that moment it was just some young man at a Zen center who had his heart blown open by Leonard Cohen and his beautiful baritone serenades. And so in that spirit I would like to invoke hallelujah. Let's do it.

*Start Meditation*

Go ahead and find a comfortable position so you can meditate — that you can relax and open your mind, your heart, your body. Whatever you're doing, wherever you are, whatever you're feeling, whatever the content of your life circumstances of this moment, just give yourself some space to soften, to rest, and to just feel the fullness of life. It might not be a fullness full of everything you love and wish for and might be fullness mixed with the good and the bad. That's often what it is. But take a moment to just settle in here. Notice that even as life calls you to put forth great effort, you can be relaxed with it. You don't have to struggle with the struggle. You can just struggle.

And on a more subtle level, you can relax with the content of your emotions of your mind, letting go of the fight, letting go of the resistance, the reactivity to the truth of what's arising right now in this moment. 

And in every moment the thinking mind will have a tendency to run a commentary. You know, just mapping things out: “I know what's going on. Here's what I need to do.” Reflecting on the past, “I wish I'd said this or done this. I wish things were like they used to be.” And so on and so on. We know what it feels like to hang out in the head — the thinking mind. 

See what it feels like to relax and allow awareness, to allow your center of gravity to just drop down into the chest, into the heart. Then just feel how exquisitely alive you are, the way of the sharp edges of the world tend to melt. When you start to see through the eye of the heart, while the thinking mind analyzes and dissects, the intelligence of the heart unites and integrates like streams and rivers flowing into a single ocean. Fill the way your the different strands of sensory experience flow into and through the heart, linking you to everything, connecting you to everything and everyone.

Rather than evaluating this moment with your mind and deciding if you like it or not — if it's useful or not — feel what it is to just take a posture of wakefulness through the heart and just feel, feel everything you feel, feel how much you care about your life, how precious it is, and by extension maybe you can sense into how much you care about life itself, the movement of life across this planet and far beyond. Notice that as the heart wakes up, as you feel into the subtle currents of what the heart knows. The heart knows realities that the thinking mind simply can't know. Just feel what it is to know this moment.

It's said in the Hindu tradition that one of the basic qualities of reality is bliss. My intuition tells me that day at the Zen center in the gardens, hearing the hallelujah echo through the canyon that my friend was intuiting and plugging into, giving himself to and invoking a bliss, an ecstasy, a joy. Not that results from the personality, getting everything it wants all the time, but rather from relaxing into the simple feeling of being, feeling the energy, feeling the wakefulness of creation itself course through us, calling us to be alive, calling us to rejoice.

***

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A Meditation on the Immeasurable Expanse

By Thomas McConkie, adapted from an episode of Mindfulness+

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I love the Pacific Northwest. I spent the first three years of my life in the Seattle area while my father was in law school, and each of the dozens of times I’ve returned, I just drink in the air. It’s amazing to be breathing the air in and seeing all the lush greenery and bodies of water. The canals and the lakes and the channels and the sounds — it’s a magical part of the world to me.

Not too long ago, I was connecting on a flight from Seattle up to Victoria, British Columbia. It's a short flight, less than 30 minutes, and I was seeing Seattle behind. And as we descended I was just looking at this gorgeous, lush greenery and huge bodies of water. And I had a simple recognition come to me, which was something like, “Oh, the Pacific Northwest — that doesn't start in the United States and end obediently in the United States. The Pacific Northwest cuts across these boundaries and these arbitrary lines we draw. It transcends any national boundaries that we've drawn over it as human beings.” That recognition was magical to me — the recognition that we can't hem life in by drawing a national boundary. 

As it turns out, I was flying up to Victoria to a Christian meditation retreat. I’d spent a lot of time in Buddhist meditation retreats, but not much in Christian retreats. And I just had this very stark awareness in that moment that I'm calling this thing a Christian meditation retreat, but that the boundary between Christianity and Buddhism and other religions is at least as arbitrary as this line we've drawn straight through this vast area known as the Pacific Northwest. 

That recognition felt incredible to me. It just felt freeing to know I'm going to some place with people to set my heart on something that I deeply care about. Never mind that it's a Christian retreat or a Buddhist retreat or any other kind of retreat.

There was a time in my life when these constructs could not have felt more different to me. They couldn't have been more different to me than a US dollar and a Canadian dollar. 

We've drawn arbitrary lines over the earth itself and called them the edges of nations. What if we've also drawn arbitrary lines around traditions? We call them very different traditions with very different purposes. 

And even within these traditions, we have constructs like salvation and awakening. And what if these two are just ideas in our minds, and the ideas obscure the raw and wild territory that is actually real? 

That's what I'd like to play with. Let go of these boundaries. Allow these lines in our minds to fade and just plunge into the primary territory. That's the invitation. Go ahead and get comfortable. We'll practice a little bit.

*Start the Meditation* 

So wherever you are, whatever you're doing, this is a gift of a moment to just come back to yourself. Whatever that means — feeling your feet on the ground, feeling the support of the ground beneath you, maybe just exhaling and letting it all go and appreciating your aliveness in this moment.

The gift of life, this vitality quickening you, animating you. We have this gift in this moment to be alive, to be awake, and we don't know if we'll have this gift in the next moment. We can only deeply receive this gift and enjoy it — give ourselves back to life in whatever way our heart is called to. 

Some people hear the word salvation, and their heart opens up. They feel great joy and great hope. Others hear the word salvation and they might want to cringe with the different connotations that that particular construct carries for them. 

Notice what the word salvation does in your body and your being in this moment. What does it evoke? What about the construct of liberation and enlightenment? Some people hear this sound, hear this word, and their awareness just opens up into the immeasurable expanse. Just the finger pointing at the moon is enough of a reminder to take them back to this primordial essence. Others hear this word, the sound, this construct, and they contract or they become disinterested. It sounds like so much new age, voodoo, fluffy spirituality. Notice what's true for you in this moment — the splash you feel through your body, through your being when you hear this word, this construct of liberation, enlightenment.

Start to let go of the sounds, the words, the constructs, the lines that we've drawn across reality, and just allow yourself to be real. Allow yourself to be reality unmediated by any thought, any opinion. Just relax and feel yourself to be this primordial essence. 

Notice as you relax how sensitive you are, how awake you are, how everything you experience, the fullness of this moment arising, you experience because you're aware, you're awake, intelligent, conscious spirit. There's no name for it, but here we are being when you really just plunge into this simple feeling of being, it feels as though we're ancient. 

Whatever this intelligence is that is awakened, this moment did not just suddenly become aware the moment of our human birth. It seems to stretch back across the eons. You might be able to sense that the very intelligence you are in this moment stretches endlessly forward across the eons, even beyond time. All together, this timeless, boundless essence in you has always been you, has always been at the very heart of what you are. 

On one hand, it takes great effort, great discipline to train our focus, our attention on this timeless aspect of cell. And on the other hand, that takes no effort at all to simply be to radiate this being, to be aware, to be awake. Any name we give to this quality, to this essence, to this territory. We'll always be too small to comprehend the fullness of what we really are.

***

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Transcendent Trust: An Interview with John Kesler, Founder of the Integral Polarity Practice Institute

In this episode of Mindfulness+ Thomas McConkie interviews John Kesler, founder of the Integral Polarity Practice Institute. 

Click here to see Thomas’s first interview with John.

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Thomas: I thought because we're fortunate to have a few minutes with you today, we could explore the theme of trust that you teach about beautifully in integral polarity practice (IPP). So right out of the gate, let me ask you: What have you found to be the role of trust in this practice you've created?

John: Well, trust is a still point that arises in a relational environment. The way I hold it is using a polarity of agency and communion in any kind of relational environment — nature, spirit, organization. And whenever we have any kind of relational environment, instinctively we move towards fear in order to protect ourselves from the other, even within ourselves, the multiplicity within ourselves. Trust is a key still point to find a sense of peacefulness and openness to something deeper.

Thomas: Beautiful. Something that I've appreciated deeply about working with you the last 10 years is that a single sentence from you can take years to unpack. And what you just said there feels really significant. We're working with a polarity as basic as agency and communion — or on a more concrete level self and other — and every moment of our lives potentially we're experiencing ourselves in relationship, not just to other people, but also to the natural world and things outside of ourselves. We're also relating to aspects within ourselves. And any time we encounter anything there's the possibility of responding with fear and shrinking from that encounter. Is that a fair way to summarize? 

John: Yes. 

Thomas: Okay, cool. So that's what we're working with. As human beings, we're always in relationship with others and with ourselves. When we're presented with relationship, fear naturally arises. The practice of IPP is to notice these moments of encounter and intuitively find a still point. How would you describe the still point of trust? What's that experience like? 

John: Well, in any polarity or multiplicity, it's bringing that energy to a still resting point of pure awareness so you're someplace a little bit deeper than your thinking mind. You're open to your deepest intuition or the Source, however you would define that. For instance, in the Eastern martial arts, it's finding that still place inside so you can respond in the moment appropriately. And yet from a place of peacefulness and fullness

Thomas: You're anticipating my next question, which is for people who are practicing mindfulness, who are interested in adult development, who are interested in just growing into the fullness of what they're capable of becoming, what's the practical value of learning to find a still point like trust? And I think you really just spoke to that. Beautiful. When you're in your Zen and you're trusting, how does life unfold for you in that space?

John: Most fundamentally from the Judeo-Christian tradition it’s “be still and know that I am God.” Be still. And you open yourself to your deepest source, your deepest place of knowledge, your deepest source of wisdom and compassion and appropriateness in the moment. And the skillful aspect of that all the myths and multiplicities and polarities serve out the spectrum of our being. How do we have a practice that helps us be still and centered and in that place of trust? Particularly how do I not react to the feedback loops of my past and the fears and problems that I've had to be able to be present to? How do I accept what's arising in the moment and assess it, and in a paradoxical way, know even more clearly what it is not to trust because I'm coming from a place of deeper trust?

Thomas: What you're saying is really profound, and as I'm listening in the moment, I'm hearing layer after layer of meaning and possibility opening up. What I hear you saying is that when we're in this still point, we're actually able to be radically present and see things as they are and therefore respond to them appropriately. On the other hand, if I can't access the still point of trust, I'm in a place of what some have called ego or struggle or reactivity and I'm actually responding to the present moment based on things that I've done in the past, which may or may not be helpful, which may or may not be appropriate in this brand new present moment. Is that a fair way to say?

John: Yeah, I think it is. And it doesn't mean that you don't have a memory of things that have happened or a track record with a particular person. But at the same time, if you can't get to that place of being very present and still you very well might be a little bit skewed in how you're reacting to the situation. Most important is being in contact with your very essence, your deepest place, both within yourself and that which you might rely on in terms of inspiration.

Thomas: Really beautiful, John. Thanks. I'm reading several books right now. One of them is from A. H. Almaas who is a spiritual teacher originally from Kuwait. He writes in this particular book called Facets of Unity about the Enneagram. What really struck me about the book is that he dedicates the first 50 pages or so to the topic of trust and he makes the claim that without a sense of what he calls basic trust — what you might call the still point of transcendent trust — we'll be afraid to let go into what the spiritual journey makes possible for us.

John: Yeah, that's nicely said. That's beautiful teaching.

Thomas: So yeah, let's hear a little bit more from A. H. Almaas in Facets of Unity.  He writes, “If basic trust is present, the soul will more easily let go of old structures, will more easily settle into simply being and will tend to let its process unfold without interference, which will lead naturally toward essential development. Without basic trust the attitude of ego will predominate, the soul will lack implicit confidence in her life and process. The ego will try to take things into its own hands and manipulate, pushing things one way or the other, resulting in the further isolation and entrenchment of ego.” So as I read this, it's striking to me. Any response to that language from all Moss? 

John: Well, my experience is that there are echoes of similarity in all the great teachings. I think if you search long enough you connect with the same sensibility. There are all sorts of words and phrases that are probably particular to his teaching. What is a soul and what is by ego? I don't really teach that one needs to let go of one's ego functions. You're the operating system that you have, and so you have to function in that way. But is there a self that's deeper than that? And what does that mean? In any event, the essence of what's taught there is very much what I try to share too.

Thomas: Yeah, there's a beautiful harmony here. If we had an entire season to dedicate to the highly evolved language of each spiritual system, I'm sure we'd see a lot of overlap, but also some very significant differences in the way you make distinctions and prioritize different things. Does that sound fair? 

John: Sure. And then also that's the beauty of studying various teachers in various traditions because you have oftentimes just brilliant insights that come from in a way that you might have been blind to because your tradition doesn't hold them as richly. So it's just a wonderful opportunity to share teachers like this and explore and enrich yourself.

Thomas: I totally agree. You pointed to a bit of a paradox earlier that wise people are telling me that I need to learn how to trust, but so much of my life has been about being discerning about what not to trust. There are so many people and situations that I can't trust. How does that square with living in the still point of transcendent trust? So let me read A. H. Almaas, in anticipation of that problem. Almaas writes, “Basic trust means trusting enough to let your mind stop, to be silent within knowing that if there is something you need to know, the knowing will come. It means trusting that if you need to do something, you will be able to do it. It means accepting and trusting the silence, the stillness, the beingness. If we don't trust, we can't let our minds be silent and we can't let ourselves be still. We think we always have to be on the go, always making one thing or another happen or not happen. So we don't let our minds or our bodies rest. We believe that if our minds are quiet, when we need certain information, it is not going to be there. We believe that if our bodies are still, when we need to act, we won't be able to.” I hear him saying in so many words that if we don't find the still point, our whole existence will be defined by struggle. We won't trust our own intelligence and presence to respond appropriately to life and so we'll constantly be engaging in struggle. That's what I hear. I'm curious how that sounds to you and any comments you might have on it.

John: Not only is it incredibly important, but it relates to my years in working with 15 archetypal universal polarities that relate to each stage of human development. When you become aware of the relational environment and all the still points that I work with, trust is the one that people I facilitate have the most difficult time achieving. Even though that is at the center of many practices and faith traditions, to find that inner peace or that inner stillness. It's a tough one because our whole life is negotiating with the things that we can't really trust in or that we might fear. And so it needs to be a central part of any practice in order to feel like you have established a deep stillness within.

Thomas: I love this, and it occurs to me as you're talking John that another polarity we can introduce into our conversation here is between the relative and the absolute. This is a classic polarity in Buddhism, and it seems to me that there's relative or conditional trust and then there is having access to a profound stillness and a transcendent trust of our deepest knowing. And somehow those two can work together. Do you see where I'm going here?

John: Yeah, exactly. As a matter of practice, most people will have to move from one to the other, particularly in the beginning, to be able to achieve that deep meditative place. But ultimately the gift of any polarity is to understand that they come together and you can hold them both in a deeply interpenetrate way so that one can be in the world with a deep sense of peacefulness and stillness. Through that, we can be all the more active and flowing and involved in determining what's appropriate in the moment. We can ask, “What can I trust? What can I trust at your deepest level?” Not coming from a place of fear, but coming from a place of fullness. And abundance.

Thomas: Beautiful John. I love that. It’s coming alive in me as we're talking here. You know, this practice of naming transcendent trust and acknowledging that there's a different quality of trust than relative trust and that we can hold transcendent trust and relative trust in our lives together and that makes both qualities of trust more powerful. That's really beautiful.

I have a story about this. When I was in my mid twenties, I had graduated from college and moved to Europe after and then spent years in mainland China. I was interested in foreign cultures and foreign languages. By the time I was in my mid twenties, I was pretty proficient in Spanish and Mandarin, but I didn't know what I wanted to do with it. I wanted to work in the world. I just don't know how. And I had this funny impulse.  moved back to Salt Lake City where I grew up, and there was this little nonprofit restaurant called One World where everybody eats. I would go in there, and the food was just glowing and the people who were working there were just glowing. There was just this profound sense of generosity that was palpable. And it didn't make any sense rationally to me, but I knew as I was holding this inquiry of what I wanted to do in my career, I thought my first step was to just sit in this kitchen and soak in whatever goodness, whatever was feeling there. I thought, “This is inspiring me, and I have this sense that it will open me up to my next phase in life.” Of course, my parents panicked because my career was stalling. I was in my mid twenties, and I still hadn't gotten a job. The owners that run One World would make jokes that they had a trilingual dishwasher who was making minimum wage. It didn't make any sense. But in my deepest knowing, I just knew if I just stayed still there and just washed dishes and really learned the generosity that this group of very beautiful people was practicing, something would happen. And I did it for several months and something out of the ether formed. And I eventually did find a job that allowed me to use my language skills, and I got to travel throughout the world. And it came from dishwashing. That's what I put on my resume to get my first real dream job in my late twenties. And that was about the time I met you as well, and you were teaching me a little bit about transcendent trust. So I don't think that's a coincidence. 

John: Yeah, that's a beautiful story. 

Thomas: Anything from you? Any moments? I tend to be a dramatic storyteller, but there can be really simple moments. Do you remember a moment recently or anytime where you felt this deep sense of trust, that it was coming from a deeper place than your personality?

John: At one point in my life I was a card carrying atheist. I was cut off from any sense that there was anything beyond, anything transcendent, anything deeper than the functioning of the human being. And then I intuitively moved into this sense of trust and stillness through meditation practice. And it occurred to me that trust is reaching the still point through a third-person experience — I trust that over there — versus communion, which is a second-person experience with Source. And I just remember the devastating moment when I realized the whole superstructure of my belief system was deteriorating. It just cascaded into a realization of the value of the second-person experience, and I realized it needed to be part of a more complete practice.

Thomas: That's beautiful, John. It, it sounds like as a card carrying atheist, somehow you cracked open to the possibility that you could come into that second-person relationship with something greater than yourself. And if you could come into communion with it that some part of you could totally merge with it and be in union with it. And that led to a new chapter in your life. Is that right?

John: Yes. And it also opened up the door to exploring various traditions because most traditions specialize in a couple of these perspectives, but not all of them. I think all these perspectives are very valuable and they're all implicitly available in every tradition. I don't necessarily mean you have to find “God” or you have to find a sense of unity with all things, and that's all there is. There are all sorts of names for it, but the power of that experience can be so grounding and so meaningful in one's life that it's worth having a practice that's open to multiple perspectives in that regard.

Thomas: Beautiful words, John. We'll close on that. Thank you so much for your presence and your insights. I wonder as we close, if you could invoke this sense of this still point that facilitates us into trust. 

John: Yeah. Why don't we just close our eyes to get into a meditative moment. And one of the things that just arises from every still point is a quality of hopefulness and love. And to the extent we can bring this sense of hopefulness and love forward, it helps us to center and be more peaceful in a place of trust, a deep transcendent trust.

Is there anywhere you can find that place of trust without limitation, the divine God, your highest self, a deep sense of oneness? And from a place of trust, move to a second-person relationship of communion — and commune and commune and commune. And feel a sense of no separation.

And in this moment experience a quality of no other — not two. And as you come out of this quality, feel the sense of transcendent hopefulness that arises out of a deep presence of love. That fruit flows through you as a universal quality that you can become the vehicle for. That relationship is all about love facing every moment. No matter how dire is an opportunity for hopefulness to bless those around you and yourself. And even as you are present with the circumstances of life and the need to make conditional judgments about what is to be trusted, know that ultimately it's all about love and that you can trust in that. 

***

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Wildfire Practice: A Meditation for Dealing with Anger

By Thomas McConkie, based on an episode of Mindfulness+.

Also, download Insight Timer and search “Thomas McConkie” to access a growing repository of meditations there.

***

A few years ago Lower Lights held a meditation retreat in Southern Utah during one of the largest wildfires in Utah history. We were pretty enveloped in the smoke, and for several days we thought we might need to evacuate. 

We heard through the news that the fire was started by fireworks. It became an interesting metaphor to me that the fireworks in and of themselves that caused untold damage were not inherently destructive. Instead, it was the tinder. It was the spark that connected to fuel that was able to burn down a big chunk of our beautiful state. 

And it occurs to me that we see this scenario on an individual level all the time in life. What do I mean by this? We have challenging thoughts. We have negative emotions. We get activated, provoked, disturbed, and triggered every day of our lives, often many times. We have an experience where we find ourselves deeply disturbed, and we hate to feel the way we're feeling. 

Sometimes it's obvious what the connection to the emotion is. Say I’m somewhere in public, for instance, and an altercation breaks out and somebody harasses and insults me, and my adrenaline's pumping and I feel I've been really disrespected.

But sometimes it's just a faint smell in the environment that triggers something deep in our body and calls up some unresolved pain that may go back decades. Or maybe it's hearing a song that we haven't heard for a long time, and that song just happens to be encoded in our personal nervous system with an extremely painful memory or a time in our life. 

Or — and I'm going to up the stakes here and get really juicy and tell you about my marriage — I might notice that I'm really sensitive to whether or not I feel like my wife is really listening to me when I'm saying something important. She and I have checked in on this over the years and she'll tell me, “Hey, I'm paying attention. Come on, give me a break. I'm paying attention.” And after a number of our own spats, I've realized, “Oh, there's something in the way people look at me and their quality of listening that is triggering to me if I perceive they don't care about what I care about.” And I realized that this core vulnerability, this pain that comes up all the time in my day-to-day life, goes back to the very beginning. It goes back before I can even remember. 

We're all like this. We all have core vulnerabilities. We all have emotions that we hate to experience. And it just so happens that life is teeing them up for us hundreds of times a day. 

I think you'd get the drift. So what I want to explore is how we work with this intensity. 

It seems to be a fact of life that our days are often disturbing for no rational reason. The sound of a song, the smell of a grocery store, or the look in our friend's eyes might trigger something in us that takes us back to pain in early life and suddenly we're transported from heaven to hell in an instant.

Maybe objectively our life is amazing. We have people around us who love us. We love our work in the world. We have a supportive family, we have plenty of food in the pantry. A lot of times the objective situation is that everything's fine, but it doesn't feel fine internally. It feels like a red alert, like our very lives are in danger. And when we started to pay attention to this in mindfulness practice, we realize that it's happening many times a day. 

In these moments we realize there’s a problem because our whole mindfulness practice is centered around how we can feel at peace and how we can be open and joyful and spontaneous for more of our lives. But if we're honest with ourselves, we realize so much of our lives we're suffering, so it's a really natural thing to fantasize and think, “What if I just once and for all didn't feel disturbed anymore? What if once and for all I learned to just hang out in heaven and never go to hell?”

What I find to be a more realistic approach to liberation practice is not to eliminate disturbance, but to learn how to more fully include it. 

We're going to practice this momentarily, but let’s first get back to the firework analogy. The fireworks themselves aren't the problem. We might think, “Oh, fireworks caused the forest fire. Let's ban fireworks everywhere.” Maybe at a state policy level that's a good idea. I don't know. But my experience is that's a very bad policy for the self and for training mindfulness. Instead of banning fireworks — instead of trying to never be disturbed because that's never going to happen — we should separate the spark from the tinder.

What's the tinder? The tinder in human life is the way we feel at the emotional level. The moment I start to tangle with a disturbance, I'm feeding that spark. How many times have you been disturbed and months later you're in your head rehearsing some story, experiencing painful memories? It's like you're putting tinder on the fire, and you don't know how to stop. 

Well, we're going to practice stopping. The sparks will fly, but we'll learn how to remove any fuel, any tinder from the situation, so the sparks burn hot and then they wink out. Just like that. Life continues to be disturbing, but we know how to handle these challenging situations. And the more we handle them, the more free we realize we already are. 

Let’s practice.

Take a few breaths. Go ahead and get settled wherever you are.

And just relax while the body softens. Whatever effort you're putting into practice at this moment, see if you can reduce that effort by 10%. Let things be even easier, just trusting that you don't have to force it. 

Good. We're going to do something a little counter-instinctual here. We're going to take the first step towards starting a massive forest fire. But don't worry, it's a controlled blaze.

In this relaxed and open state, I want you to call up in your memory, in your experience, the last time you were really upset. Remember the last time you really lost your cool. Where were you? Who were you with? Notice what happened. We're not going to pay a lot of attention to why you lost your cool. We just want to set off these fireworks in the body. 

If you can, go to the very first moment you recognize that there was a storm in the body. There were fireworks starting to go off. These fireworks — these intense sensations — they're often so intense and so uncomfortable to us that we'll do anything not to feel them. We don't want to feel them. We organize our whole lives around not feeling them, and one reliable way to blunt the sensation is to escape into our minds and let thoughts flare up in emotion. Sometimes we erupt in anger. Sometimes we collapse into a self loathing sadness. Oftentimes we reach out and blame, saying it’s someone else's fault. 

Just notice whatever intense sensation you can conjure up in your memory. It might be as intense as it was the first time you had the experience. It might be much dimmer. 

If it's too intense, I'd just invite you to open your eyes, to stand up and walk around. You don't have to jump too deep into this all at once, but if you're able, feel the intensity associated with the last time you really lost it. Just notice specifically in the body where it comes up — not emotionally, but at the level of sensation.

So for me right now, I'm noticing that I felt a disturbance that quickly turned into anger and aggression, but before my interpretation that spun it into anger and aggression I'm aware of simply a pressure in my chest. That's where I want you to work for a minute. Just the raw spark, just the sensation. Find it in the body. Feel its intensity and even describe it to yourself simply as I just did. It could be a closing in the throat, pressure in the chest, heat and a sense of being flushed throughout the body. Whatever it is for you just notice the raw sensation, the spark, and see clearly that you're able to stay present to the sensation. 

Ask yourself if these raw sensations could actually damage you. And most often when we ask this question we realize the sensations can't objectively harm us, though we don't like to feel them. 

So you can take that invitation to go deeper, to really just envelop and permeate the sensation with awareness, to hold it with equanimity acceptance, even unconditional kindness. Note, as you do this, that these sensations are likely very familiar too. Oftentimes the most disturbing sensations that we have in life go way back to early childhood. They represent sensations that signal to us that our very lives might be in danger because when we're kids in an emotionally saturated environment in the family, these disturbances can feel life threatening.

And then we grow into adulthood and realize we have adult capacities to just hold these disturbances like infants in our arms. We can hold these disturbances. Even when an infant is wailing and crying and screaming, we can still unconditionally love that infant. So whatever you're feeling at this moment, just hold yourself. Whatever disturbances, whatever sparks, see if you can just stay present to the intensity of the sensation without getting into emotional interpretations, narrative stories about whose fault it is that you feel this way in this moment without making judgements about yourself for feeling this way. It just is. Nothing to do but just be in the intensity for the moment. Let the fireworks blaze. Eventually they'll die out. 

If you get pulled into thinking, if you get tangled up in emotion, notice this and remove the tinder from the firework. Don't let the fireworks make contact with any fuel. Don't let the raw intense sensation in the body connect with emotion or story. 

Keep breathing when you work this way. It's a cue to commit to stay present, to investigate the sensation without judgment, without story, just feeling the raw aliveness of this moment. 

***

Beautiful, beautiful work, everybody. Thank you. 

Take this practice with you. You will be disturbed another time today, perhaps many more times. Remember at the raw level of sensation, you can let these fireworks just go off, not let them connect with the tinder of the thinking mind or of our emotions. As you do this, you realize that at the level of awareness, you are already free, free to be in heaven and enjoy the green pastures. Take an occasional trip through hell and realize that somehow, miraculously, you remain happy beyond condition.

***

Want to deepen your practice? Download the Mindfulness Essentials course.

Photo by Issy Bailey on Unsplash

Balancing the Senses: A Meditation on Presence

By Thomas McConkie, based on an episode of Mindfulness+.

You can follow along with this extended meditation here.

Also, download Insight Timer and search “Thomas McConkie” to access a growing repository of meditations there.

***

Take a moment to settle in. 

Whatever you're doing, wherever you are, just gather awareness in the physical body. 

Feel sensation flowing in this moment, feel the ground beneath you, and feel the flow of breath. Without any special effort — just having an intention to become more fully present — we find that settling in just kind of happens.

Let the belly soften, expanding and contracting with the breath.

Because awareness is all-pervasive, throughout all of experience, it's not very difficult to contact. And when we contact awareness, we naturally start to taste the flavor of stillness in our experience: peace and serenity, but also tremendous dynamism, power, and spontaneity. 

[Silence]

Focus on just softening right now, letting the settling process occur.

And whether you're in stillness or in motion, just appreciate that you're aware. You're aware of experience, aware of sensory experience, and aware of awareness.

Something that's interesting about awareness is that as human beings, we tend to pay attention in a very specific and habitual way. If we notice what we’re experiencing in a given moment throughout the day, it's likely that a lot of our attention will be going to thoughts in the mind as well as to our visual experience. There are biological and evolutionary reasons for this. And there are cultural reasons that these tendencies get reinforced.

In this meditation we’re just going to intentionally shift the way we're paying attention, redistributing our attention more evenly across the whole spectrum of sensory experience. 

You can start in this moment by bringing awareness to hearing. Notice the experience of hearing, opening up awareness to the soundscape: 360 degrees around and above you, below you. Notice what sound is happening and what a marvel that we can hear it all. Just allow yourself to become fascinated by hearing. Never mind what you're hearing — just that you are hearing. In this way we give awareness a little bit of a stretch, starting to flow more energy and awareness into the mode of hearing.

Stay with it, just another moment. Aware of hearing. 

[Silence]

Good. Now shift your awareness to sensation throughout the body. Maybe you're outdoors and feel the touch of sun on your skin. Maybe the caress of the breeze, the support of the ground beneath you, the touch of your clothing to your skin. Just shift your awareness to feeling.

And again, as we do this, we're not worried about what we're feeling. Maybe your sensations in this moment are mostly comfortable, or maybe they're uncomfortable — or maybe some blend of both, which is usually the case. Notice your capacity as you do this to receive the experience of feeling awareness, to be aware of feeling. What a marvel that we have bodies and can feel at all. 

See if you're able to allow awareness to expansively focus on the entire physical body. Just feeling the flow, the cascade of sensation through awareness. If you notice that tension fixating on one small area of sensation, just notice that and relax. Open back up to holding the entire body in awareness.

And if your attention contracts into a thought in the mind or a sound around you, you can just notice that and practice letting go, coming back to feeling awareness. 

[Silence]

Good. Now bring attention to seeing, and as you really put your awareness into the mode of seeing, be surprised. Be in wonder that you have eyes at all and that you can see, never mind what you're seeing. You could be staring at the magnificence of the Grand Canyon or you could be staring at a blank wall, and the miracle of seeing is not diminished in either case. Just notice in this moment, awareness taking the shape of seeing. Note how effortless it is to see. You don't have to strain to see the light of the world. It just streams in like sunlight through stained glass windows, pouring into creating the experience, seeing spontaneously, effortlessly. Notice that it's not you who is seeing. Seeing is just happening.

[Silence]

And here comes the fun part. Keeping awareness on the experience of seeing, start to embrace and include the other two modes of experience we were working with. Notice this sense of hearing just happening without effort. Notice feeling just happening without effort. Feeling is happening, hearing is happening, seeing is happening — they're all just happening.

And as you include all three of these modalities at once, you may find your gaze starting to relax in a natural way. You can still see perfectly fine, but your gaze is softer. There's less intensity, less of a laser-like quality to your sense of seeing. You're just allowing the light to pour in your eyes, the sound to pour into your ears, all of sensation to light up your senses. It's happening all at once. We tend to really unconsciously pour most of our awareness in a given moment into what we're looking at, either out in the world or some image in our mind. So we're thinking, I just feel this new balance. It's a bit like riding a bicycle. Once you get the hang of it, the balance just happens. Feel what it's like to be an equilibrium with all the senses at once.

Seeing, hearing, feeling — all different shapes of awareness, awareness, effortlessly happening. 

But who is it that's aware?

***

As you go about your day or go about your life. Once in a while you can come back to this meditation, and you can just notice in a given moment how much attention is going towards seeing and then consciously soften the gaze a little bit, soften the gaze so that you're not staring at anything particularly out in space, but just letting the light pour back into your eyes. 

And if you pay attention in a particular way, you'll notice your sense of hearing open up, your sense of feeling open up. You can drop back into this dynamic equilibrium of sensory experience. You can come back to presence powerfully again and again. 

***

Want to deepen your practice? Download the Mindfulness Essentials course.

Photo Credit: Aaron Burden on Unsplash